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danny writes "How are brain size and intelligence related to social complexity? What
are the evolutionary underpinnings of cooperation? How sophisticated are
animal communication and social cognition? And do animals have culture?
Read on for my review of Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies."

Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence and Culture

author

Frans de Waal and Peter Tyack

pages

616 pages

publisher

Harvard University Press

rating

9

reviewer

Danny Yee

ISBN

0674009290

summary

18 papers on primates, cetaceans, other mammals and birds

tester data

How are brain size and intelligence related to social complexity? What
are the evolutionary underpinnings of cooperation? How sophisticated are
animal communication and social cognition? And do animals have culture?
These are some of the broad questions addressed by the eighteen papers
in Animal Social Complexity, which look not only at primates and
cetaceans, but also at hyenas, elephants, bats, and birds. The common
focus is on societies that are individualized, with members recognising
each other as individuals, and stable, with long-lived members and
on-going relationships, and in which there are learned survival skills
and social behaviours. Some of the papers are overviews of particular
species or taxa, some address specific questions in the context of a
particular species, and some present cross-species comparisons.

Consisting of the papers from a conference held in 2000, Animal Social
Complexity is a professional volume, complete with a hundred pages
of references. But the topics covered are of widespread interest,
and the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of the papers makes them
mostly accessible to the lay reader.

Carel Van Schaik and Robert Deaner present a life history perspective on
cognitive evolution: demonstrating a link between social complexity and
intelligence/brain size is complicated because both are correlated with
long life spans. Randall Wells presents an outline of dolphin social
complexity based on long-term studies on the communities in Sarasota
Bay, Florida. And Katy Payne gives an overview of social complexity in
the three elephant species.

Christophe Boesch describes examples of complex cooperation among Tai
chimpanzees, in group hunts for monkeys and in territorial conflict with
other chimpanzee groups. Christine Drea and Laurence Frank describe the
social system of spotted hyenas and argue that more attention should be
paid to social complexity in carnivores. It has commonly been argued
that social stress is a consequence of subordination; Scott Creel and
Jennifer Sands present evidence suggesting that it may in fact be a cost
of domination, at least in some species.

Three of the papers debate the underlying mechanisms of social cognition.
Ronald Schusterman et al. argue for equivalence classifications as a basic
structure. In contrast, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney argue that
"nonhuman primates are innately predisposed to group other individuals
into hierarchical classes". And for Frans de Waal the conditionality
of behaviour suggests a role for if-then structures in primate "social
syntax".

Taking a comparative approach to laughter and smiling in primates,
Jan Van Hoof and Signe Preuschoft find that "laughter has evolved in
the context of joyful play, and that the broad smile has evolved as an
expression of nonhostility and friendliness, taking its origin in the
expression of fearful submission". Looking at vocal learning in four
parrot species from Costa Rica, Jack Bradbury suggests that in "ecology,
social organization, and vocal communication, parrots appear to be
more convergent with dolphins than they are with other birds".

Gerald Wilkinson looks to bats for an independent test of the
Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, probing the relationships between
brain size, vocal complexity, and colony size. And Peter Tyack explores
bottlenose dolphins' use of signature whistles in communicating social
relationships.

Following in the footsteps of Imanishi, pioneer of Japanese primatology,
Tetsuro Matsuzawa considers, as examples of "culture", sweet potato
washing among Koshima monkeys and nut cracking using stone tools by
Bossou chimpanzees. Toshisada Nishida describes the "flexibility and
individuality of cultural behavior patterns" among chimpanzees at Mahale.
And in "Ten Dispatches from the Chimpanzee Culture Wars" William McGrew
gives an overview of the arguments between cultural anthropologists,
psychologists, and primatologists (among others) over chimpanzee culture
-- and over the definition of culture.

Hal Whitehead looks at sperm whales, the cetacean culture debate more
generally, and the possible effects of "cultural hitchhiking" on genetic
diversity. And Meredith West et al. find a critical role for social
interaction in learning and development in cowbirds and starlings.

In addition to the eighteen papers, there are a dozen shorter "case
studies" which tackle narrower questions. Animal Social Complexity
is an important contribution to the scientific literature. And it
has a wealth of material for anyone fascinated by social animals and
not intimidated by scientific methodology, a little bit of statistics,
references and scholarly language.

Carruthers, Mary. The book of memory : a study of memory in medieval culture / Mary J. Carruthers. Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990

A multi-disciplinary approach to how medieval memory was constituted. Carruthers goes into how modern memory is "documentary" rather than "rote." Really dense and good book that avoids the pitfalls of behaviorism that animal psychologists can fall into. Since I haven't read the above papers, I would assume these folks are enlightened by

The common focus is on societies that are individualized, with members recognising each other as individuals, and stable, with long-lived members and on-going relationships, and in which there are learned survival skills and social behaviours.You might be able to say that but insects do not view each other as individuals and thus are not the subject of the book.

We refer to the communal insects as workers, drones, and queens, and you're assuming that they view eachother in the same fashion. For all we know, they refer to themselves as "worker who's good at finding x part of y leaf", "worker who's good at regurgitating food", "worker who's exceptionally good at cleaning off the young"...etc etc. The biology terms are just convenient classifications for us stupid, time-strapped humans and do not refect reality.

Or, they could view themselves as, well, as absolutely nothing because their lives may be based on simple programmed responses to certain chemicals, and they really may have no concept of "self" whatsoever. I'm not saying that is necessarily the case, but you are criticizing the previous poster for over-simplifying insects' behavior by applying human classifications to them, when you may, in fact, be over-complicating their behavior by applying human feelings and thought processes to them.

Ants bees and termites have an advantage when it comes to social complexity though: because they have a queen (rather than the workers reproducing directly) a fundamentally different Darwinian dynamic happens, that encourages cooperation. It's not intelligence as much as it is their evolutionary "motivators" that cause them to work together as they do rather than compete with each other as other animals often do.

(Note that a worker bee is designed to die when it stings, since its only motivation is what is good for the colony, rather than what is good for itself. That would *never* happen in a species where all the individuals could reproduce directly.)

Ants bees and termites have an advantage when it comes to social complexity though: because they have a queen (rather than the workers reproducing directly) a fundamentally different Darwinian dynamic happens, that encourages cooperation.

It's not just the Darwinian dynamic that encourages cooperation; it's helped along by pheromones from the queen bee. These pheromones inhibit the sexual development of the worker bees (who are all sexually immature females as a result).

Deprived of a queen (and her pheromones) for a sufficient time, some worker bees will stop cooperating and will begin to lay eggs. They also begin to secrete the same pheromone that queen bees secrete, inducing other worker bees to feed and groom them as though they were the queen.

However... these egg-laying worker bees have never mated. Indeed they can't mate; they never developed the required anatomy. So they lay only unfertilized eggs, which, due to a strange quirk of bee biology, develop into male bees (male bees all come from unfertilized eggs - they have no fathers and no sons!). A hive with laying workers is soon teeming with males, who do no work and cannot even feed themselves, but who CAN mate with queen bees (from another hive - remember this hive's queenless) and thus carry on the bee's genetic legacy.

A previous post in this discussion remarked that culture is *transmitted* and not hardwired. Though the apis class structure is involunarily genetic/chemical, they do have language. A bee can do a dance that tells other bees where there is food. What is language except the ability to express the idea of something that isn't present/currently observable?

I don't know if bee language is learned or hardwired, though. My instinct is to say learned because a lot of things can go wrong with hardwiring "five s

But on the other hand, there isn't a km square of land that doesn't have ants, they existed thousands of years before us(we are but infant compared to them in term of age) and they are the only animal that can resist nuclear and biological weapons. We use science because we have weak bodies. Maybe their science isn't as advance as our because they are physically strong and work as a collective, so science is less important for them?

Oh, and you know that they do use chemical weapons, and some species are kn

But I wish the "blurb" had left brain size out of the mix. If brain size has anything to do with intelligence (within a group), then humans would be in the zoo & elephants would be running the show.

Once I read "brain size," all I could do was think of the efforts -- well discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man -- of 19th and 20th century physical anthropologists to use "brain size is correlated with intelligence" to justify racism & sexism.

The only thing that brain size is really correlated with is body size. Cattle have larger brains than most monkeys. Men have larger brains than women. Blacks have larger brains than whites.

Sounds to me like the anthropologists are out looking for grant money...

Brain size (in terms of mass) does not have everything to do with intelligence, rather I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate. For instance, while human brains are not as big as elephants, we have evolved a convoluted surface topology of the brain to maximize total cortical area devoted to processing. To an impressive degree, so have elephants, but check [brainmuseum.org] out their overall topology. elephants have HUGE temporal lobes that may have significance in terms of auditory processing.

You also have to consider that elephant brains while larger actually are a smaller percentage of total body weight than human brains.

I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate...

A similar argument could be made -- would be made, intuitively, I'd think -- that the more "complex" a critter is, the more complex its DNA would be. More combinations means more potential "circuits" would be the idea. Actually looking at the human genome, though, makes you scratch your head over that one. Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes

Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes instead -- right around the level of bacteria, for one comparison.

I don't understand why this figure generated so much fuss. We're looking at a combinatorial system - you don't need many inputs to get an enormous number of outputs. It's like being amazed that telephone numbers in a large city "only" have eight digits.

Brain size is usually taken in relation to something else, and not as an absolute value.

Popular measures include relating brain size to body mass or body complexity. The premise of these measures is that you've got to factor out the overheads. In computer terms, it's similar to the concept of looking at RAM in terms of the OS requirements, and the overheads for each thread.

Another popular measure looks at the number of folds in the neocortex, but this only works on animals with a neocortex, so it's real

Brain size is usually taken in relation to something else, and not as an absolute value

Of course.

I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. In it, he traces the history of many of our most cherished statistical methods (Spearman, Pearson, etc), which were developed to relate brain size to "something else." In those cases, the purpose was to adjust the brain size of white males so it consistently came out on top.

As long as you also warn those you recommend that Gould wrote Mismeasure, in large part, to aid in the campaign -- largely grounded in Marxist ideology rather than science -- of denigration of E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology.

To put Gould (and Rose and Lewontin) in context, recommend also Ullica Segerstrale 's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, a dense but thoroughly entertaining look at Soci

Gould was a popular writer. He made a good living doing it. That alone is enough to make a lot of his peers very jealous. The fact that he was a socialist in an American society that was swinging to the right must be considered as well. Gould's "enemies" are as guilty of attacking a straw man as he is. (And he is very guilty of doing that -- it sells books.)

As far as it being "Marxist," I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong. In fact, one

Its not a matter of the size of the brain. Its a matter of the brain's peaks and valleys (sulci and gyri). The more sulci and gyri, the higher the brain mass and greater complexity. Humans, by far, have the most sulci and gyri in our smaller brains. This allows for more brain in a smaller container!

"laughter has evolved in the context of joyful play, and that the broad smile has evolved as an expression of nonhostility and friendliness, taking its origin in the expression of fearful submission".

Ah, this must explain why I never felt like smiling during my punk rock days. I was younger, angry and much less secure and could have "evolved" a behavioral approach that prevented my appearing submissive to anybody. (that and I simply thought of myself as one baaaad dude.:-)

Don't get me wrong: nothing wrong with planning for the future, or in a quiet moment remembering cool stuff that we did with our grandparents when they were still alive, but almost all of our thoughts are best focused on what we are doing now.

BTW, I too often rant to my friends and family about what I consider to be an indication of the fall of western civilization: too many people are caught up in a lust for material possessions - I think that is just another aspect of not living in the moment.

I too often rant to my friends and family about what I consider to be an indication of the fall of western civilization: too many people are caught up in a lust for material possessions - I think that is just another aspect of not living in the moment.

Me too! Recently I did my tax returns, I run my own business from home and after all my write-offs I made a whopping $5000/year or so! Obviously I am not out to win any monopoly game here.

Definitely, that is pretty much what my attitude has become as I've grown older, I've also been able to come to terms with death much more because my attitude is "I was dead before I was born" and I don't recall any of that.

I don't have religious beliefs to fall back on, I don't believe in life after death either other than the spirit/memories of those who have died remain with the living, but only for so long unless you did something famous or something.

And here I thought I had an advantage of living in the past, present and future on a whim. I was hoping those living in the present only and needing to go into debt to buy a new pair of shoes (or whatnot) they'll wear once were the unevolved animals.

I distinctively remember hearing on a radio talk show (Coast to Coast, late night) that there has been research and soft "evidence" that dolphins form very complex societies, and that they even understand and practice self-sacrifice for the benefit of the population.

But whether or not we as humans regard such a practice as "cultural" or "savage" is another issue altogether.

They are social insects and they work together (in the same family) in growing, foraging for food, etc. Ants do not have big brains, they are complex as a group. Ants socialize by chemical odors to attack, defend, forage for food, etc.

The chemically processes that drive ant society basically make the colony a large, slow, brain. Different nodes/ants perform different tasks and use chemical and electrical intructions to do so. The more ants, the more successfull the colony. The more ants to faster the colony adapts and grows.

you can see evidence of this by the fact that the number of offspring produced by the queen cannot grow exponentially like it does in other animals t

this post is spot on. In David Suzuki's [davidsuzuki.org] latest series, The Sacred Balence [sacredbalance.com] , he talked to a scientist Brian Goodman [sacredbalance.com] about Ants. Goodman gathered data on the communication between ants that are working and ants not working.

"... Some kind of collective emergent behaviour will be observed as the result of local coupling. In neural organizations, retrieval of associative memory (and maybe consciousness) can be thought of as emergent properties...." (www.sacredbalance.com/web/antsociety.html [sacredbalance.com])

Called Natural Horsemanship [parelli.com]. A technique that is based on deep understanding of horses social structures.
Your first step is to teach the horse you mean no danger. Become a -safe- element of the environment. No matter what goes on, the horse feels fine with you.
Second step: Get the horse to recognise you as another horse. Of course no hooves, no eating grass. But typical horse behaviours. Horses yield from pressure from other horses but push against predators. Horses rarely approach each other directly, usually go along some rather obscure curves. And so on...
Third step: Gain leadership of the herd. Challenging the horse, duelling it, in a special kind of fight that doesn't involve violence, but charisma. Strong, hard looks, stepping forward, making the oponent lose ground...
And then polishing the communication. Getting the horse used to unusual situation, generally utilising newly gained power.Horses that were proclaimed "lost" by the best classical trainers, were "recovered" and wildest ones became nice and gentle thanks to "horse whisperers" as those who practice natural horsemanship are sometimes called.

Numerous scientific studies have shown that animals can learn thing and act as teachers to other animals passing knowledge from generation to generation. Crows can count, Chimps can learn sign language and even teach it to their kids. Dolphins mimic humans around them, birds learn songs that become parts of their society. Beavers find elaborate solutions to patch their dams. Squids can learn to open jars.

In 1920 a bird learned to open milk bottles in England. A few weeks later all of that bird specie knew

Any life form that is obligate multicellular, posseses distinct organ systems, is heterophagic and capable of controlled, self-sustained motion at some point in its life cycle is an animal. Humans are animals in the biological sense. We are not a Kingdom unto ourselves.

heterophagic : More common usage is "heterotroph" or "heteroptrophic"..I probably should have used that term. It's from the Greek roots, it means "to eat others". They are biological terms, not likely to be in your abridged Webster's. Sorry, I should have defined it in the original post.

It means that the organism's caloric food source is the consumption of other organisms. The "we are not a Kingdom unto ourselves" is a reference to the fact that we are members of the animal Kingdom.

Remember...the organism must fulfill all requirements listed. Remember also that heterotrophy refers to caloric food source. Venus fly traps, pitcher plants and the like use the insects they catch as a nitrogen source. Their caloric foodsource is still photosynthesis, making them autotrophs.

As for motion, what is described at the (broken) link is not the controlled motion I was talking about. I suppose I should have again been exceptionally precise with my st

In the original, I mentioned the qualifier "at some point in the life cycle"

Sponges, other tunicates, corals and barnacles are free swimming as larvae. They only become sessile as adults.Reminds me of a favorite quote of mine regarding sea squirts (tunicates), which are, incidentally, the closest thing there is to a vertebrate that's not quite a vertebrate:

The juvenile seasquirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a ru

As the owner of an African Grey parrot, I see everyday how brain size affects communication and social cognition. My Grey tells me "Wanna go to bed" when she is tired, says "Want food", "Want water", "Want a toy", and want scratch whenever she wants one of these other things. She also identifies people by name. My grey (her name is Elmo. I thought she was male until she was DNA tested) also knows how to say "I love you". Earlier in the year, she started learning that women aren't all named the name of my ex-girlfriend. I have a female roomate and a girlfriend now and Elmo started listening for whoever was in the house at the time and saying "I love $PROPERNAME" Whenever she wanted to interact with that person and would also just call them by name.

I have a lot of other stories too. My slashdot name is based on the name "Weeboo" which is what Elmo named me for some reason.

If you want to read more about avian (specifically African Grey) cognitive ability, try going to www.alexfoundation.org [alexfoundation.org] to read more about an African Grey named Alex and Dr. Irene Pepperbergs [wikipedia.org] research with interspecies communication and animal cognitive ability.

What you're describing is just conditioning. You likely gave Elmo food while saying "Want Food" a lot. Thus, the brain connected "Want Food" with you giving food. Then, whenever Elmo is hungry, she just triggers your response by saying "Want Food"

This has been done for centuries. It neither demonstrates knowledge nor understanding - just primitive cause-and-effect association.

Considering that crows can both make and use tools and octopus can learn to open containers by watching other octopus, limiting these things to "primitive cause-and-effect association" seems a bit chauvinistic on our part.

Possibly. Of course if that were the case, then if she asked for juice and I gave her water, she wouldn't push away the water and ask for juice again. Food is just a generic term. Dr. Pepperbergs Grey identifies specific food items and even assigns names to new fruit. For example, he knew the words for bananna and cherry. When presented with an apple, he called it a banerry. Insides colored like a banann

Our Grey's psychotic - he hates men, and will only interact with women.

He recognises the names of different foods, and you can list them - banana, carrot, beans, peas, nuts, etc - and he will say 'Want Some!' when you get to what he wants, and he will ask for particular items if he sees you eating them.

Trouble is, only my girlfriend and daughter can feed him - I have to lob whatever it is in his dish, or he'll try to take my finger off.

I think it is very possible. I also have an Amazon parrot that does not talk and have caught Elmo picking up the various objects and toys on her cage and identifying them while Deuce (my Amazon) sits on the cage with her.

I know that if Elmo asks for a specific object (object "x") and you give object "y" instead, Elmo repeats her original request or ignores object "y". She occasionaly will say "no" when she doesn't get what she wants, but has abandoned that word in favor of the more entertaining (and emba

One of the staples of culture as we define it is musical achievement. It has been demonstrated that certain animals can "play" the piano with more complexity than simply banging their beaks/paws on the keys. That is, they can both recognize musical tunes and harmony and demonstrate the capacity to mimic the sounds.

Now considered separately, meither of the abilities to mimic nor to differentiate between pleasant and unplesant sounds is truly "cultural", or more cultural than instinctive. However, this is where we certainly run into a question of the definition of culture -and what exactly makes us as humans gifted with it and not any other animal.

First, define intelligence.:) The problem with this kind of research is that intelligence isn't (as yet) quantifiable, only qualifiable and only in very abstract terms.

We have two known examples of demonstrable lateral thinking on the part of avians. Grey Parrots have shown an ability to actually understand sentances containing verbs, adverbs, adjectives and the indefinite article. They also exhibit the ability to handle basic arithmetic.

Crows, on the other hand, have been shown to be able to study problems, manufacture tools from raw materials, and use those tools to solve those problems.

It's easy to argue that these cases are only over a very limited range of conditions, and under very controlled conditions. And that's all true.

The point I'm making is that if we use a simple definition of intelligence - say the ability to handle abstract concepts, logical and lateral thinking, and the ability to handle conceptual modelling (which is basically what a language is), then intelligence is amazingly common on Earth.

Hey, that's not too bad a definition, but it includes too wide a range of life. It becomes useless as a definition, because so little is excluded.

Now we move onto society. If we do a basic study of human society, we see that reptilian traits (eg: the ability to act/react without thought) are far more highly prized than mammalian traits (eg: the ability to have emotional associations, the ability to form bonds that have nothing to do with personal gain, etc).

From a strict study of current social patterns, humans are probably one of the most primitive of all the mammals. The preference of using the older, reflexive parts of the brain, over and above the emotional and intellectual parts, is definitely regressive.

Modern society is the way it is because it actually works. Many things, from riding a bicycle to karate, would be impossible if there was a heavy dependence on the "thinking" parts of the brain.

My point? Societies are going to evolve towards whatever works well, though not necessarily for the same reasons, and are not necessarily constrained to the social norms.

In consequence, any such study is going to be extremely difficult to do. There are a lot of unknowns, and many of them are unknowable. Further, social studies often fall into the "soft" sciences, which are badly-funded and often badly-run.

The papers are worth reading, but I'm not confident that those doing the research know enough to do the research well. I'm not even sure anyone does. That makes the results suspect, even if the actual studies themselves are of value.

It seems to me that humans are involved in a one-way relationship with every other animal on the planet. If there were a mass extinction of humans, through anything other than a species-hopping virus and/or global thermonuclear war, if we simply *weren't* here anymore, animals (in my opinion) would continue to live and thrive. If our extinction was not based on any environmental factors other than social issues.

I would say that it's their *lack of society* that makes other animals so strong... the way they seemingly operate on instinct and loosely defined (by our conventions) social structures. Oscillating (beyond our understanding) between these two polar opposites. If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less. Point is, we need them, they *don't* need us. What's more, I believe we could learn a lot from them in terms of living socially. And I mean that in a sincere way not a dig against us as humans but as suggestion that just because we appear to be the most intellectually motivated species on the planet, doesn't mean we're automatically right and just in our endeavours.

I'm reminded of the line from Aliens when they're discussing the impending break-in of the aliens and someone says something to the effect of "you don't see them fucking one another over for a share".

If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less. Point is, we need them, they *don't* need us.

Isn't this simply because we have no natural predator? No animal bases its life on hunting, killing and eating humans (except the Predator:). Being at the top of the food chain means we wouldn't be missed if we vanished. Some domesticated species of animals and plants would probably struggle to survive, but everything else would contin

we don't need them. The planet needs animal life to support animal life. If all other animal life died out, only science and technology could save the remaining single species as it would overpopulate and ravage its food source.

also, if all dog species died out, humans would not perish, not would many other species.

if all humans die, just one species has been eliminated and most others would survive as they do now. Now if all ants died, that would be an ecological disaster and a number species

... the way they seemingly operate on instinct and loosely defined (by our conventions) social structures.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by 'loosely defined [...] social structures'. A lot of species live in groups with very clearly defined structures and roles: who's the alpha male/female and who isn't, for example, which decides who gets to eat first, who gets to drink first, who gets to mate etc etc. The individual fulfilling each role may of course vary -- for instance, alpha male gets

There's a species of tropical birds (sorry I forget the name) where the male is responsible for building the house. So it gathers all the sticks and builds itself a multi-story house. Then is clears out the ground floor so its nice and clean. Then it goes out and gathers the finest flowers it can find and groups them into a pile on the ground floor. It does the same thing with the finest fruits. Then it lines the entrance-way to the house with some more fruit. Then, very proud of itself, it calls for the females to come check out his crib. Whoever builds the nicest house gets the hottest chicks. If that's not "smart and intelligent", then I don't know what is. And no, I'm not making this up.

While I wouldn't say they have 'culture' they do exhibit a high amount of social complexity. But are they more or less complex than the Naked Mole Rat, [cornell.edu] the only mammal that lives in a colony like hive insects?

Well, socially I'd have to say the ants are more complex -- they have more social casts, and thus are better adapted to living as hive animals than the mole rats. I know that's hard for us mammals to accept, but mammals aren't the pinnacle of social animals -- heck, most species of mammals don't even live in packs/herds.

A peculiarity in the genetics (haplodiploidy) of insects in the order Hymenoptera is the likely underlying cause of the evolution of sociality in ants, bees, and wasps. While females (all worker bees, ants, wasps, etc. are female) have two sets of chromosomes, males only have one. This affects the relatedness of individuals. In particular, haplodiploidy makes an ant, for example, more related to its sisters than to its own daughters and sons. For ants, bees, and wasps, the most selfish way to pass on your genes is to raise more sisters. As a result, social behavior appears to independently evolved as many as 11 times in Hymenopterans -- appearing several times in the ancestors of what we now know as ants, bees, and wasps.

If you are serious in studying this and other sociology/nature/behaviour styled stuff. Check out "Mutual Aid" by Kropotkin. It gives the anti-social darwinism view of nature and relationships in nature, supported by the ideas of Darwin himself.

Over the past five years there's been a major research effort looking at primate cultures mainly under the guidance of Cristophe Boesch (Chimps - Pan troglodytes spp) and Carole van Schaik (Orang-utans - Pongo pygmaeus), and even Monkeys (the village idiots of the primate family) have been shown to have culture traits.

First off -- geez, there are some bad moderators out there today. Parent post offtopic? Hardly. Dead on topic, if you ask me.

That being said, culture doesn't necessarily have to mean an appreciation of the arts or some human social charateristics. It could simply be the existence of order within a group. In that case, culture can be as simple as the patterns of a flock of birds or a school of fish, or as complex as the interactions of humans in determining socio-political norms. It pertains to the possibility of non-randomness in behavior, and this denotes intelligence and possibly culture.

I would think it would relate more to learned patterns of behavior, though, and exclude instinctive behaviors. Like the flocking simulators they set up in the early 90's that showed that bird behaviors in flocks can be simplified to a few set rules, more or less. I think culture is transmitted information, not encoded. That's just IMHO, of course.

That depends on what opne considers "culture." Coincidentally, I just started taking an elective in cultural anthropology. One of the first things we discussed in the class was animals and culture. It seems that chimpanzees can actually use tree branches to dig termites out of their mounds. I know this isn't new, but I think that learned tool use is at least the beginnings of culture.

Silly man.
Dogs drink out of the toilet because the water is more fresh and cool than the water you put in their drinking bowl.
Dogs own you. They make you walk around when you dont feel like it, and they make you pick up their poop after them.
Dogs assimilate you into their culture in order to have you fulfil their every needs.

Dogs own you. They make you walk around when you dont feel like it, and they make you pick up their poop after them.

God damn I'm tired of that stupid Seinfield crap.

Yeah, dog owners pick up their poop, while holding a choke chain around their necks, after having subjected them to cosmetic surgery as babies, after having surgically sterilised them, after having taken them forcibly from their mothers...

From reading the review, I assumed that the differentiation was individualization of groups; i.e., a given group of chimpanzees has characteristic behaviors, and another group has a different set of characteristic behaviors; this would tend to indicate learned behaviors as a tribal imperative, or rudimentary culture - as distinguished from instinct. In fact, if these differences in common behaviors didn't exist, we would chalk up most special behaviors as instinctive, no?

Most of the human race couldn't write The Marriage of Figaro (sic). You're confusing high culture (play written by senior French civil servant) with culture, i.e. tribally distinct behavior patterns.

As an example, while we're on France around the Revolution, Mariane is often portrayed in French painting as bare breasted. The acceptability of this is an example of a cultural difference between the French of the period and the US of the Superbowl incident. If one tribe of chimpanzees has a characteristic behavior pattern that differs from that of another tribe - there is some ground for discussing whether this is a cultural difference akin to the difference between French and American beach behavior, or the difference between American and European uses of knives and forks.

Arts: the Bowerbird [wikipedia.org] will Decorate [google.com] it's nest, actively arranging objects in a way that suits his aesthetic.Koko and Michael the gorillas are also known for their paintings. [koko.org]

Beliefs? This one is Tricky. I'll leave it up to someone else to tackle this for now. Although animals showing signs of mourning (evidence shown under institutions) forms a good basis for beliefs.

"And I wonder, what do the real ants think about me?"
Ant: W0000, a nice yummy crumb. Oh wow...wtf? What the HELL is that? The ground is moving all around me.
*several seconds later and one missed pot shot at the ant*
Ant: OH DEAR GOD! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHHH

I always liked the "ant theory of aliens"; the idea is that, in the same way humans constantly surround ants, and the ants cannot even understand our presence due to the simplicity of their organism, humans are constantly surrounded by alien life, but we cannot know and are unable to conceptualize it.

Maybe the aliens have been using raid (the weather) on us for some time now...